What the Fuck Am I Waiting For?

There’s a question I’ve been asking myself lately: What am I waiting to feel before I finally give myself permission to move?

And the more I sat with it, the more I realized I wasn’t necessarily waiting for the right time. I was waiting for the right feeling.

More confident. Less afraid. More certain. More motivated. More financially secure. More ready.

How many times do we know we want something different but convince ourselves we’ll go after it once we feel a certain way? Maybe when work settles down, there’s more money in the bank, the kids don’t need us as much, or we finally know exactly what the hell we’re doing. But what if that feeling isn’t supposed to come first?

Maybe Confidence Comes After the Action

We tend to think confidence works like this: First I’ll feel confident, then I’ll do the thing.

But I’m starting to believe it’s usually the opposite.

You do the thing while you’re still scared. You survive it. You do another thing. And little by little, you start collecting evidence that says, Wait. Maybe I can actually handle this.

That’s how self-trust gets built.

Self-trust isn’t knowing everything is going to work out exactly the way you want. It’s knowing you won’t abandon yourself if it doesn’t.

And sometimes the thing keeping us stuck isn’t that we don’t know what we want. It’s everything that happens between knowing and doing.

What’s Actually Keeping You Stuck?

This is something I see with women all the time. We say we need clarity, but when we start digging, there’s often more clarity there than we realize.

You know you’re unhappy with something. You know the conversation you need to have. You know the idea you keep coming back to. You know you want more. You might even know exactly what you should be doing.

But fear, overthinking, perfectionism, people pleasing, or an old belief gets between knowing and actually doing something about it.

I call some of those beliefs Bruels—bullshit rules and beliefs. They’re the things we picked up somewhere along the way about who we should be, what we’re allowed to want, how much space we’re allowed to take up, and what has to happen before we’re “ready.”

And sometimes we’ve lived by them for so long that they don’t even sound like beliefs anymore. They sound like facts.

The Bath Isn’t the Breakthrough

Now, I love the rituals. Give me the journal, the candles, the meditation, the hypnosis and the long bath where I contemplate my entire existence. 😂 There’s real value in slowing down enough to hear yourself again.

But the bath isn’t the breakthrough. What you do when you get out is where the work begins.

Eventually, you have to send the email, record the video, have the conversation, make the offer, apply for the job, set the boundary, or take whatever small step belongs to your life.

It doesn’t have to be huge. In fact, I think we get ourselves into trouble when we believe change has to begin with some massive declaration.

Sometimes it starts with one tiny action that tells your brain: I’m not waiting anymore.

So, What the Fuck Are You Waiting For?

I want you to actually answer this:

What am I waiting to feel before I finally give myself permission to move?

Then ask yourself one more question:

What would I do if I stopped requiring myself to feel that way first?

You don’t need to blow up your life. You don’t need a five-year plan. And you sure as hell don’t need to reinvent yourself by Monday. Listen to the latest podcast episode where I deep dive into this question and others. Podcast

And if you want to grab the companion journal that ties into this episode grab it here -

Journal

You just need the next step.

I’m talking much more about this in my newest episode of Finding Her: Unapologetically — “What the Fuck Am I Waiting For?”

And because I don’t want you to listen, think damn, I needed that, and then go right back to your day, I created The Permission Journal, a FREE 7-day guided journal to help you explore what you’re waiting for, what may be underneath it, and what happens when you start choosing action before perfect confidence.